Salvation, Faith and Works
29th May 2005, Parish Communion
Genesis 6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19
Romans 1:16-17; 3:22-28
Matthew 7:21-29
In church, we often talk about salvation. Our belief that God has saved us is a key part of our faith. But what does it mean to say we are saved and how does it happen? The question of how it could happen has been one of the key questions that has shaped our Christian heritage and theology. Are we saved by our faith in God or by the good things we do, are we given salvation or do we have to earn it? This often gets called the question of salvation by grace or works. And the classic answer to this question, maintained, developed and tested by experience over hundreds of years, is that our salvation is through God's grace on the basis of our faith in him.
This is all very well until we hear readings like those we have had this morning from Genesis and from Matthew: Noah saving himself and his family by building an ark and Jesus' words, "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord', will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven." followed by his telling the parable of the wise and foolish men and their houses. In each of these cases, what people do seems to be an important part of their salvation, whether building an ark, doing the will of God, or building on the right sort of foundation. And yet in Romans we heard Paul's words: "since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith." Paul is saying that everyone fails to do enough to earn salvation, and so instead God gives us salvation as a gift, the gift of Christ, and that gift is made effective by our faith. We cannot earn, buy or barter for our salvation, we can only receive it as a gift given freely by God, and the gift becomes real in our lives when we believe in him and in the salvation he offers for us.
But what then of building the ark in response to God's instruction, what of doing the will of our father in heaven, what of the things that we do? If we are unable to earn God's love or our salvation, do the things that we do matter to God? I'm sure that the answer to that question is resounding 'yes', but we need to think a bit about why that is the case if we don't want to end up back saying that it's the things we do that save us, rather than the things that God has done. If we look at the story of Noah, we see that his faith came before his actions. God's warning about the flood came to him as a gift and his response in building the ark was a response that followed from his faith. The combination of God's gift to him and his own faith called out of him a response in action that saved him and his family from the flood. Without each of these three elements being in place he would not have been saved. Without the warning God gave him, his faith would have meant nothing, without faith he would not have understood the danger he faced, and if his faith and God's gift had not together called out of him an active response in building the ark, still he would not have been saved.
The same thought process can be applied to Jesus' words about doing the will of the Father: without God's gift to us of revealing his will, we cannot follow it; without faith in him, we will not hear his call or understand his will and so we will not be able to carry it out. The things that we do are a sort of sign of how God's grace and our faith are at work in us. We might even call them 'sacramental' - a sacrament is often defined as an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible truth - and the good things we do, what we might call our righteousness, is an outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible presence of grace and faith in us. In all of this, faith must come before actions and God's grace comes even before our faith. So now, when we look at the parable of the wise and foolish builders, we see that the rock on which the wise man built his house represents our faith and God's grace, and that the actions that are called out of us by the grace and faith within us are upright and stand firm, just as the wise man's house stood firm against the floods. But without God's grace and our faith, our lives and actions are vulnerable to the onslaughts of our daily lives, just as the foolish man's house could not stand when the floods came.
The house that stood firm against the flood pointed to the solidity of the rock that was it's foundation, and in the same way the good things in our lives point to the faith and grace that underpin them. But in our lives we all fall short, just as Paul warned, and it often feels as if our faith has far more in common with the shifting sands under the foolish man's house than with any kind of rock. But just as our faith comes before our righteousness, so God's gift to us comes before our faith. We do not have to earn our salvation through building a good enough faith any more than we can earn salvation by being a good enough person. Faith is the acceptance of God's love for us and his goodness towards us, this is what matters most. Faith is not something to measure, but something to give thanks for, a true faith will show in our lives, but this is always a sign of our salvation, not a point earned to qualify for it. Amen.